Minutes...
The "minutes" of a meeting are the official record of what happened at the meeting - what issues were considered, and what decisions were taken.
It's been decided that minutes of Community Councils - not just ours - need to be changed, and that a more condensed format will be better.
Previously, the Committee Manager would make a valiant effort to capture more or less everything that was said. This made for quite a long document, and one potentially needing more corrections, as people (not unreasonably) sought to "adjust" how their comments were reported. Nevertheless, this style seemed to suit those people who go to a lot of meetings, and especially the experienced campaigners who are an important part of the Community Council membership. The trouble was, noone else was reading them, so issues and questions raised at the meetings were going unnoticed by other areas of the council - limiting the influence we'd like Community Councils to have.
Another problem was the the pile of papers thumping on the doormat was proving rather daunting to those people for whom official meetings are less familiar, making it less likely that they would come to further meetings. Community Councils profess to serve everyone, but in my view it's possible to distinguish two distinct groups: the experienced campaigners, and what I'll call "ordinary" residents - people who may never have been to meetings like these before, and who are unfamiliar with the usual conventions. Although both groups are important, they have differing needs which can be difficult to balance. A decision has been made to try and make Community Council meetings less formal, but at the same time more effective, and condensing the minutes is one way in which we hope to achieve this.
In future, rather than capturing everything that went into a meeting, the Committee Manager will aim to report what came out of it. This will certainly include questions and "official" answers, but he or she will not be attempting to record everything that is said. This is actually normal practice in Council meetings, but will be a change from how we have done things in the past. Both Chairs will aim to help the Committee Manager by indicating when they feel something should be recorded. Anyone at the meeting is welcome to request that something be "minuted", but the Chairs will normally take this as a prompt for wider discussion, so that a consensus can be detected - if one exists. So, we hope that the minutes will become less like the letters page in the local paper, and more like a business-like record of issues discussed, and decisions taken. Remember, of course, that the central part of the meeting is the Community Forum, and there is no Agenda for that (hidden or otherwise!) - residents are free to bring up any issue which affects our four wards and the whole point of these meetings is to give residents a voice. This change is meant to make that voice more effective -and more widely heard.
It's worth pointing out that this isn't the initiative of this Chair, or even this Community Council. This change is one of a package of proposals which came out of weeks of consultation and research on how well these meetings work across Waltham Forest. The research made a point of targeting "ordinary" residents who don't yet come to CC meetings, and potentially disadvantaged groups, as well as our "regulars". It has the solid backing of the Cabinet Member for Communities.
We'll be monitoring how well this works, and looking to adapt it in the light of experience. As ever, comments are welcome.
14 June 2008